“The Pacific Era Has Arrived”: Transnational Education among Japanese Americans, 1932–1941

2003 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiichiro Azuma
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Woman ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Native Land ◽  
The Pacific

Looking back on the two years at Keisen Girls' School, I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to study here…. Our teachers have taught us that it was mistaken if we simply aspired to mimic the ways of Japanese woman. Cognizant of our special position as Americans of Japanese ancestry, we must instead strive to promote the U.S.-Japan friendship. Furthermore, we must adapt the merits of the Japanese spirit [that we have acquired here] to our Americanism. Back in the United States, we will dedicate ourselves to the good of our own society as best possible citizens, cooperating with Americans of other races and learning from each other…. Such is the mission of the Nisei as a bridge between Japan and the United States—one that we have come to appreciate [through our schooling in Japan].Just about two years before Pearl Harbor, a young Japanese American woman took this pledge to herself when she completed a special study program in Tokyo, Japan. Although the shadow of war loomed increasingly over the Pacific, thousands of American-born Japanese (Nisei) youth like her flocked to their parents' native land during the 1930s to pursue cultural and language learning, as well as formal secondary and higher education. In any given year following 1932, an estimated 1,500 young Nisei students from North America resided in Tokyo and other urban areas of Japan. Often referred to as Kibei after returning to their native land, these young women and men attempted to embrace their ethnic heritage and identity during their sojourn in Japan with the support of Japanese educators.

Existential Crisis of the Japanese American Woman: A Study of Post War Japanese American Fiction

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Nitusmita Bhattacharyya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Native Community ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War

The Japanese American women, during the Second World War, suffered from subjugation at different levels of their existence. They had been subjected to marginalization based on their sexual identity within their native community. They were further made to experience discrimination on the basis of their racial status while living as a member of the Japanese diaspora in the United States during the War. The objectification and marginalization of the women had led them to the realization of their existence as a non -entity within and outside their community. However, the internment of Japanese Americans followed by the declaration of Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt and the consequent experience of living behind the barbed wire fences left them to struggle with questions raised on their claim to existence and their identity within a space where race and gender contested each other. In my research paper, I have made a humble attempt at studying the existential crisis of the Japanese American women in America during the War.

Psychology, Context, and the Risk of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Psychological Conditions ◽  
Predisposing Conditions

Chapter 11 compares the attitudes of some Americans toward Japanese and Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor with German attitudes toward Jews. Theories of genocide generally posit predisposing psychological conditions and then examine instances of genocide to confirm whether or not those predisposing conditions were present. The case of the Japanese American confinements offers an opportunity to examine a case in which at least some of the suspected predisposing conditions were present but genocide did not follow. This suggests that there were significant differences between America and Germany in the intensity and penetration of anti-Japanese and anti-Semitic attitudes, respectively, and also that important legal and political safeguards against minority mistreatment that were compromised in Germany remained at least partially intact in the United States.

In Defense of Justice

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

scholarly journals Book Review: Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Megan Coder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Muslim Majority

Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People is a single-volume comprehensive resource that addresses many aspects of Japanese American history and culture, and “reveals the long, hard, and aching struggling of Japanese Americans to be treated as Americans” (xiii–xiv). Editor Jonathan H. X. Lee begins the preface with a brief overview of Executive Order 9066 authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, which enforced a mass incarceration and relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Lee compares this to the modern-day Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” issued by President Donald Trump, which is the travel ban that prevents seven Muslim-majority countries from entry into the United States.

Refugees from Abroad and at Home

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Issue ◽  
Internal Migrants ◽  
Refugee Problem

This chapter examines the work of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the wake of World War II. Even before the United States officially entered the war, waves of refugees from the European conflict pushed the AFSC to act, and it established hostels to help the newcomers adjust to their new lives in America. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, AFSC activists found themselves faced with a second refugee problem—this time internal migrants as Japanese Americans incarcerated in American concentration camps looked to resettle in the Midwest and East. Again reflecting the AFSC's understanding of race as a multifaceted, global issue, its efforts to create hostels to help both European and Japanese American refugees reveal the continued evolution of Friendly ideas about race, ethnicity, and assimilation in the United States as Quakers increasingly responded to these wartime crises with less direct solutions aimed at overcoming job and housing discrimination.

History and Memory: Narrating the Japanese American Incarceration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine C. So
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Books

Narrating the Japanese American incarceration has always been an act of both remembering and forgetting, a representation of what happened when the civil and human rights of 120,000 Japanese Americans were violated during World War II. From the moment that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which enabled the removal and imprisonment of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States, “remembering” the Japanese American incarceration has been an act that has alternately justified, explained, documented, repudiated, remembered, redressed, reconstructed, and deconstructed a profound betrayal of the United States against its people. In reading the histories and memories of Japanese American incarceration, it is important to consider a wide range of forms, the historical context of the representation, and the audiences to whom the narratives are addressed. While there have been a number of memoirs, novels, poetry, short stories, plays, films, photography, art, and music that make up Japanese American incarceration culture, it is important to consider artistic interventions alongside the national narratives that have served as the foundation of legal decisions, congressional acts and testimonies, national and state memorials, museum exhibits, and history books. Such histories often acknowledge the injustice of the incarceration, even as they simultaneously defend its necessity (legal cases), explain it as aberration (congressional acts), or incorporate and resolve the injustice within a larger US narrative of progress (museum exhibits and history books). National narratives of the incarceration thus involve remembering and forgetting, both making visible the injustice to a national consciousness and casting it as an exception to a progressive national identity. Art forms that remember the incarceration often bear witness to what national histories can forget, the disquieting absences, erasures, silences, fragments, contradictions, and traumas that can never be fully redressed nor reconciled.

scholarly journals My Fate is in Your Hand

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Alex Cateforis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Art World ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The People ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Artistic Achievement

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) was a Japanese-American émigré artist active and successful in the United States from the mid-1920s until his death. However, despite his artistic achievement and integration into American culture, Kuniyoshi’s life and fate turned tragic as the Pacific War erupted, which intensified extreme racism toward the people of Japanese heritage and increased nationalism in the United States. Kuniyoshi’s 1950 painting My Fate is in Your Hand reveals the artist’s dual and conflicted identity, his social and political fate in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, and suggests that a year before his death, the artist no longer controlled his fate. A majority of white Americans and the conservative American art world rejected him as an Asian “other.” Kuniyoshi grew weary, stressed, and anxious, an artist caught between success and rejection and his split Japanese and American identity. In this essay, I argue that each major portion of the work’s title— “My,” “Fate,” and “Your Hand”— reveals the symbolic meaning of the painting and suggests the artist’s inner state in 1950. I also analyze four of Kuniyoshi’s earlier works to provide insight into the meaning of My Fate is in Your Hand and to tell the story of the Japanese-American artist.  

Toward More Equal Dialogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuko Takezawa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Japanese Student ◽  
Cultural Baggage

For the benefit of young scholars in both countries, I would like to present one more story following Professor Noriko Ishii, about the experience of a Japanese student studying Japanese Americans in the United States during the 1980s. First, I have to confess that when I embarked on my path as a scholar in the United States, I was rather naïve, with my approach to Japanese American studies being shaped by the cultural baggage I had carried from Japan. After spending my undergraduate years there majoring in comparative culture and cultural anthropology, I had hoped to continue and deepen my studies by focusing on Japanese American acculturation and ethnic identity in an American graduate program. Through the fieldwork, however, I came to realize that such an approach positioned Japanese Americans on a continuum linking the two poles of “American” and “Japanese” culture—precisely the framework critiqued in the introduction to this volume....

The Wavy Navy in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-206
Author(s):  
Peter Kornicki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Language ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Junior Officers ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Navy ◽  
Language School

In 1943 five junior officers in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve made their way to Boulder, Colorado, to join a course at the US Navy Japanese Language School. The US Navy had turned its attention to Japanese language training before the outbreak of war, largely thanks to the efforts of two intelligence officers who had grown up in Japan. While the US Army began training Japanese Americans, the US Navy Japanese Language School did not accept Japanese Americans as students but did use them as teachers. Most of the five RNVR officers already had extensive naval experience, including combat on the high seas, but they finished their 18-month course too late to be able to play much of a part in the war, unlike their American fellow students, who saw action in the Pacific.

An Insider’s Response to Racism: Abe Fortas and the Japanese Question during the Asia-Pacific War, 1941–1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-324
Author(s):  
Seok-Won Lee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

Abstract Abe Fortas (1910–1982) has been best known for service during his legal career as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States for four years from 1965 to 1969. His supporters have characterized his life as a lawyer who supported and defended the American Civil Rights Movement during the tumultuous periods of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. However, observers of his career have paid little attention to the fact that Fortas was one of the few American bureaucrats who took the stand in defense of those of Japanese ancestry in the official hearings in the 1980sinvestigating the internment of Japanese Americans during World War ii. Fortas, as undersecretary in the Department of the Interior from 1942 to 1946, had a close relationship to key U.S. policies dealing with people of Japanese ancestry during the Asia-Pacific War, including the establishment of martial law in Hawai‘i and the ending of the Japanese internment. Fortas’s responses to and critiques of U.S. policy regarding the Japanese American question reveal the intertwined dynamics of how white racism developed and challenges against it at the governmental level.

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